


Anything to Lose

by Deepdarkwaters



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Eggsy & Roxy Bromance, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-01
Updated: 2015-09-01
Packaged: 2018-04-18 12:00:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4705286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/pseuds/Deepdarkwaters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alymere's shaken, Galahad's a hero, Merlin's tired of their drama (but really impressed), and Lancelot's having a lovely time dogsitting while shit goes down on a mission in New York.</p><p>"Fucking surveillance mission my arse. Why's this <i>always</i> happen when I'm out with you?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anything to Lose

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eversincewefellapart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eversincewefellapart/gifts).



> Fantasy casting: Catherine Deneuve, Faye Marsay, Isabella Rossellini. (SWOON.)
> 
> Thank you Kook for beta duty!

Galahad fights like she's been choreographed, all graceful precision and deadly strength, but together, Rex said once, they look like they're animated. Eggsy remembers it suddenly as she's kicking a guy in the face, heel connecting with his jaw and crunching the bone so he howls and spits blood and broken teeth. He's fast with his gun but Galahad's faster, ducking neatly beneath the swing of Eggsy's leg as she brings it back down to the concrete and taking him out with a bullet to the forehead.

"Bloody wish I had my brolly," she mutters as another half a dozen of the fuckers spill out from the stairwell door onto the roof, and Eggsy laughs, a silent breath out, squinting up at the dazzling blue Manhattan sky.

"Fuck up the 'undercover' part of 'undercover operation' carrying something like that in this heat."

"Nonsense." A bullet to the wrist makes one of the goons drop his gun, then she flings herself behind a rusting pipe with Eggsy and they both shoot carefully around the side, one kill, one disabled with a shattered knee. "British eccentricity covers all sorts of strange habits. Do try to leave at least one alive, hm?"

"Do my best but I ain't promising nothing." She flicks out her hand and shoots a couple of stun darts from her watch. "Fucking surveillance mission my arse. Why's this _always_ happen when I'm out with you?"

"Because Galahad is a drama magnet," Merlin murmurs in her ear and Eggsy grins.

*

_"My name's Eggsy Unwin... sorry, Carrie Unwin, and. I'm up shit creek."_

_Even after they let her go, the fear sat heavy in her belly like the roiling feel of a hangover as she made her way down the steps in front of the station, as if they were just fucking with her or something because they could. Even when she turned at a voice – "My name is Harriet Hart, and I gave you that medal" – the uneasiness stayed, slowly morphing into confusion, suspicion, then hope, which in Eggsy's experience was really just another more sickening kind of fear._

*

"Fuck _sake_ ," Eggsy snarls when a grenade lands between their feet, and manages to give it a motherfucking beauty of a World Cup penalty kick so that when it explodes seconds later it's already twenty feet in the sky away from the side of the building. She can feel the heat of it on her face, the ripple of the the explosion throbbing through the hot air, and – like every time – can't help thinking about her mum. "Galahad, let's fuck these bitches."

"Don't say bitches," Galahad says automatically, even as she's reloading and dashing out from the side of their shelter. The ring of gunshots echoes around the low concrete walls, shouts and stamping feet, the gurgle of someone dying with blood in their lungs, and – "Alymere," Merlin warns but Eggsy fucking does it anyway because the element of surprise has never failed her yet in her two years with Kingsman and there's something fucking brilliant about the stunned look in some bloke's eyes any time she runs up a wall – or, this time, a clanging metal pipe – like Donald O'Connor and shoots from above, hitting every moving target with her moving weapon like a boss and landing soft as a cat, rolling into a crouch so Galahad can vault over her and go hand to hand with two of the pricks she's disarmed. Galahad's always been gorgeous to watch right since that first day in the pub, ramrod posture and unexpected strength, knuckles and knees landing hard enough to knock the guys out as Eggsy's darting another three and grabbing their guns.

*

_"Holy fuck!"_

_"What?" Harry asked – like they weren't in a gym full of mirrors, like she couldn't see herself reflected from every angle. Her hair was tied back in a drenched ponytail, blonde darkened with sweat, cheeks flushed with exertion everywhere except the silvery web of scarring that sprawled from her cheekbone up around the side of her eye to her temple. She wore vanity proudly like a fucking diamond tiara, Eggsy noticed that about her the very first time they met, and everybody thought she'd be busting to fix her face with more surgery once she was well enough – but V-Day changed a lot of things for a lot of people and scars became like honour badges, reminders of survival. That or she just fucking knew it suited her. Everything suited her. Fucking aggravating perfection standing there so innocently with her scarred face, flushed and gleaming with sweat everywhere, her forehead, the collarbones visible above the top line of the sports bra she wore to work out, the definition of muscles showing beneath it._

_"Nothing." Eggsy couldn't stop staring. Fucking ninety five years old or whatever she was and abs like something from a comic book. Unbelievable. "Didn't know you was this fuckin ripped, that's all. Never seen you out your suit before."_

_Harry smirked as she drank from her water bottle. "You've seen me in my pyjamas and robe."_

_There. That was where it started, that fucking little smirk as Harry wandered off to the showers and Eggsy found she couldn't concentrate on her uneven bars work, except she thought – as she landed on her arse and Rex laughed from his seventh mile on the treadmill – that really it started in Holborn, with a rescue and a chance._

*

"I wash my hands of you both." Merlin's voice would sound weary, if they weren't so completely incapable of hiding their amusement. "Well, since you've decided to go off-piste on this _simple surveillance mission_ , did you leave me anybody alive to interrogate?"

"You get your intel or you get us back in one piece, guv, you can't have both."

"Lancelot would've got me the intel even if it meant coming back in a mop bucket."

"Fucking harsh!" Probably true, to be fair. "Fucking little golden boy. He there? Tell him I'll send him a postcard, yeah?"

"Why on earth would he be here?" Merlin says carefully after a moment, and beside Eggsy Galahad starts laughing, the shaking silent kind, and goes over to the heap of unconscious bodies to start tying them up ready for collection.

"Can't believe you was ever a spy actually out in the field, you can't keep a secret for shit."

*

_The weeks after V-Day were hard. It wasn't just learning on the job - Eggsy and Rex thrown headlong into missions far more complicated than anything brand new agents were usually assigned - but the general fucked up state of the world: the nutjobs who came crawling out of their holes trying to take advantage of the chaos; the way there was nobody who hadn't lost someone they knew; the staggering sense of disbelieving grief that hung in the air like pollution, ignored as much as possible but impossible to escape._

_And Harry. That was hard._

_Four weeks into her coma, three weeks after Merlin located her shattered but alive in a Kentucky hospital, Eggsy and Rex were undercover in Mexico doing body shots off a bunch of suspected arms dealers and ended up drunk as fuck lying on the beach watching the sun blink up red and gold over the edge of the horizon. She slipped her arm around him and he grinned like a puppy, resting his head against her shoulder and twisting bits of her loose hair around his fingertips._

_"Still in love with Merlin?" Eggsy asked._

_"A bit. Still in love with Galahad?"_

_"A bit. Shame, innit. Coulda been perfect, me and you."_

_"It's already pretty perfect, Eggs."_

_Not really, though. Not when Harry was lying there full of drugs and tubes with half her head shaved – and Jesus wasn't she just going to fucking hate that when she woke up? If she woke up._

_"Bruv, you should tell 'em."_

_He snorted at the idea. "Because that wouldn't be at all unprofessional or awkward, would it? They called me a foetus the other day."_

_"Yeah, but like..." At least they're not in a coma with about a hundred and seven percent chance of waking up a vegetable if they wake up at all. "It's a new world, yeah? You say what you need to say when you can, ain't we all learned that?"_

*

The attack happens suddenly – a guy either rousing with a fucking temper or pretending to be out and taking his chance when Eggsy gets close with a rope to help tie him – and then slowly, movements and sounds like a film played at half speed as he runs at her. She gets her gun up and shoots him point blank when he's a foot away but he's built like a fucking tank and a bullet's never going to stop the momentum of nineteen stone of muscle.

The back of her knees hit the low concrete wall and then there's nothing around her but sky.

Everything's still in slow motion – she's got enough time to think, strangely unruffled, _Jesus it's gonna take me six years to hit the ground at this rate_ , enough time to see the the beads of sweat on the guy's forehead as his corpse flies past her like Superman – until there's the curl of fingers around her wrist, her own close tight as a vice around Galahad's, and panic slams into her gut like a punch and forces out the world's most fucking embarrassing bloodcurdling scream, limbs thrashing like that's going to do a fucking thing a thousand feet in the air.

Merlin's voice is sharp in her ear – "Alymere, _still_ " – and Galahad's is rapid above her – "Alymere. I won't drop you, but I need you to pass me your gun."

She doesn't want to think about how Galahad's managing to anchor them both to the roof without using her hands, the whole thing seems as precarious as her sanity right now. Her hand – the one not clinging desperately to Galahad's wrist – is shaking like fuck so for a moment she thinks she's going to fumble the gun, and what a fucking disaster that would be, but then Galahad's got it, Eggsy sees the sharp glint of sun on the metal as she raises it, then there's the double crack of two shots and the heavy thump of a collapsing body.

All of this, falling to gunshots to the wrenching pain in her wrist when Galahad hauls her back up over the edge of the wall, it can't be more than seconds but it feels like an age, like she's been hanging there over eighty floors of empty space since about the birth of Christ. She can't stand when she's back on the roof, like the relief making her breath heave hard in her lungs is turning her legs to rubber too; she staggers, still clamped to Galahad's wrist, and only lets go when she sinks to her knees and presses both her palms hard to the floor, hard enough to graze on the rough concrete.

"Fuck," she says eventually, because what other fucking word is there for bullshit like this?

There's a hand resting on the back of her neck, not moving, just a warm reassuring weight there, and Eggsy leans back into it and opens her eyes to find Galahad staring at her, stricken with something that looks pretty close to terror.

"Drama magnet," Merlin says again, sounding exhausted. "I'm retiring. Let's get you off that roof. Extraction team eta ninety seconds."

In the distance there's the rattling sound of helicopter blades coming closer, and Galahad's hand – Harry's hand – starts moving tiny comforting circles with the thumb as Eggsy tries to breathe like she's not just nearly died.

*

_"Someone was holding my hand," Harry said. Her words were still slurred – they said she might need speech therapy or she might be fine, it was hard to tell until the bones and brain were fully healed – but it seemed rude to find faults in miracles. "It's difficult to explain. I was aware of people, speech, sometimes, but not faces or words. I remember someone holding my hand."_

_"Yeah," Eggsy said, casually helping herself to the bunch of grapes someone's left on the bedside table and casually lying to Harry for the very first time. "Merlin fancies you."_

*

She's left the curtains open so the hotel room's not dark, not really; beyond the glass doors leading to the balcony there's a blanket of lights, cars and windows and neon, and it seems fitting for the city that never sleeps to be the thing keeping her company like this at past one in the morning. Well, that and Rex on Whatsapp. They can't talk about the mission and he knows better than to ask, but he's got some kind of sixth sense when something's wrong, he knows it's there even when he doesn't know what it is, the same way she knows when it's him.

Another text buzzes through, a photo of Rex's scrunched-up, fake-protesting face being licked on either cheek by MB and Aphra, captioned 'We don't miss you x'.

_Yeah well you've got dog arse lick on your face now genius x_

After a minute he texts another photo, this one of him holding MB up in the air and planting a kiss right above her stubby little tail, and Eggsy laughs out loud but does it softly, conscious of Harry sleeping next door.

_Stop. You ruin her, she won't want to leave yours when I'm back x_

_I do not ruin dogs_ , Rex texts back. _I've only bought her four new toys this week & two coats. Remarkable self-restraint._

_RUIN!!!!!!!!!! STOP! (Don't stop) x_

_Eggs aren't you tired? X_

_Tired not sleepy. Rough day x_

_I know. Do you want to talk about it? X_

_Nope. I want to talk about dogs x_

_Ok give me a sec, I need to get a vine of this idiot barking at the hatstand x_

*

_"Pretty dog. What's her name?"_

_"MB."_

_"As in Mr Bond?"_

_"No."_

_"Marlon Brando?"_

_"No. Modesty Blaise."_

_"Oh, brava."_

*

By the time three o'clock rolls round Rex has vanished on a night mission and Eggsy's still too wound up to sleep. It feels so stupid. There have been loads of accidents worse than this – breaking her arm flipping a car wasn't exactly fun, nor was the time her pilot had to crash land in the middle of the Pyrenees, or being shot in the thigh, and that's the last fucking time she goes on any undercover mission requiring a swimming costume instead of a suit, thanks – but even that moment of despair before Merlin blew up everyone's heads on V-Day wasn't this bad. She can't settle. The second time she dozes off and jerks awake biting back a yelp of fear at the sensation of falling she just gives the night up as a loss, because the alternative is get fucking blackout drunk on overpriced minibar shit and then have to put up with accounts invading her debrief to moan about unnecessary expenses when she's got a blinding hangover (again).

She opens the doors to get some air into the stuffy room. Then, when that doesn't really help, she steps right out onto the balcony and leans against the railing, staring across the illuminated city towards the dark stretch of water. She half-expects another jolt of panic at being way up here, or at least a creeping sense of unease, but there's nothing. It's like Rex said once about his unconquerable dread of skydiving: _It's not heights. I don't mind being up high. The part I object to is plummeting at terminal velocity toward the earth._

"Couldn't sleep either?" Harry says, and Eggsy's fingers tighten briefly around the top railing in surprise at the voice before she turns and attempts a smile.

"Rex kept sending me pics of MB tryna ride Aphra's back like a donkey."

"Christ, he's as ridiculous about those animals as you."

"Oi. Out the three of us, who's got the dead stuffed dog in the loo?"

"Well, I suppose you've got a point there."

Harry looks strangely soft in the moonlight and the ambience of the city's neon, hair tied out of the way in a little plait reaching almost to her shoulder with all the shorter layers escaping fuzzily from the crossings of the braid. She's wearing a t-shirt and proper pyjama trousers, because of course she fucking is, even in the middle of a heatwave; Eggsy feels underdressed in her boxers and vest, like that even makes sense, and has to fight the urge to cross her arms self-consciously over the nothingness of her chest.

"I just keep thinking about that fucking _noise_ ," she says suddenly. There's just enough distance that's it's almost a sick sort of funny now, but the memory of it still makes her feel like she's about to shit herself. "Just, you know, fucking _screaming_ like that, like some Fay Wray damsel in distress, Jesus it's so embarrassing. Gonna fucking plague my nightmares for years."

"Mine too." Harry's smiling at her, sideways and self-deprecating, not like she's finding anything funny, then it slips and just looks haunted. "I dreamed I dropped you. I thought I was going to."

"Well, at least there woulda been plenty of time to dart myself unconscious before I splatted on the pavement if you did."

"Christ," Harry mutters. She takes a step back from her balcony railings, and Eggsy reaches over the barrier between them to hold her arm, to stop her from going back inside.

"I knew you wouldn't." It comes out more fierce than she intended, but she just can't fucking bear the twisted look of upset on Harry's face for one more second. "Glad it was you and not, like, Bedivere or someone. Sweatiest hand I ever shook, fucking hell."

Stepping closer to the barrier linking their two balconies, the lamplight shining from Harry's room is enough to illuminate the bruising on her wrist, dark smudges in the shape of desperate fingers – the same as those on Eggsy's. Neither of them have broken bones, just bruising and spraining; it still hurts like fuck, but it's that weirdly satisfying sort of hurt that you can't help twisting and poking just to feel it, like an exhilarating reminder of _life_. Carefully, Eggsy slides the fingers of her left hand down Harry's forearm, pressing them gently into the marks they made earlier, then catching her breath when she feels Harry doing the same.

"Did you ever," she starts, then stops and tries again because of fucking course Harry didn't. "There used to be this thing in juniors, you get embroidery threads and you tie them in knots all around each other, you can do like stripes and shit, these twisty helter skelter round ones. It was like a fad for a bit when school banned slap bracelets. Me and Rhian and Jamila all made them for each other, like all different patterns but the same colours. Like." This all sounds so fucking _stupid_ but she's said too much to stop now. "Friendship bracelets. You were supposed to keep them on forever, right, cos if you ever took them off that meant you weren't friends no more, but I had to take mine off when I joined the army. And I was like sixteen, you know you take all sorts of weird shit too seriously then? I was all stressed out I had to cut them off, cos I couldn't even untie them cos they'd been knotted on tight for almost four years by then, but the girls were like shut the fuck up you bellend it don't change nothing."

Harry's sort of frowning, but her thumb's sweeping in gentle little arcs across Eggsy's skin.

"Anyway," Eggsy says desperately, trying to ignore the voice in her head – which sounds suspiciously like Rex – gleefully cackling _Eggsy you stupid prick_. "I dunno why I thought of them. Just, I dunno."

"Eggsy."

"What?"

The back of Harry's fingers brush over her cheek and into her hair. "Stop talking."

When Harry releases her wrist to touch her hip and draw her closer to the railings between them, Eggsy slips her arms up around Harry's neck and kisses her the same way she fell – fast at first, and then slowly, shuddering scared until Harry's fingers find her wrist again and don't let go.

*

_"You think I've got anything to lose?" she said back then._

_She thinks of it now more like having everything to gain._

*


End file.
